The M8A by comparison was an exotic motorcar with the aluminium 7 litre Chevy V8 hanging off the back of the monocoque. "We started running a prototype car in March this year. It was really one of last year’s cars with lower profile tyres and the body cut down. Then we tried a cast iron 427 engine in it, a litre bigger than the engine we ran last year. When we first offered the engine up to the chassis, it looked like an engineering impossibility, but bearing in mind our Formula 1 construction with the stressed Ford engine, our Can-Am solution was obvious. The old chassis was cut in half and the engine became the rear of the car with the rear suspension hanging off a subframe. With this mobile test rig we tried a dry-sump setup, wings, new brakes, and all the while the new M8A was taking shape on the drawing board."

The initial test with the first of the new cars was on July 16th, but England’s traditionally showery summer weather interrupted continuous concentrated development. Bruce crashed one wet morning at Goodwood knocking a corner off the car and setting progress back even further. While development on the first chassis and the construction of Denny’s chassis was coming along in England, Gary Knutson, an ex-Chaparral man from away back, and Colin Beanland, a Kiwi who had been McLaren’s racing mechanic in 1958, were pressing on with dry sump development on an aluminium 7 litre Chevy V8. Initially they worked on the engines in a shop in Capistrano Beach, California, but later they shifted in with Al Bartz when he moved to bigger premises in Van Nuys. By now McLaren’s Engine Division also employed American Lee Muir.

Back at the ranch, Don Beresford (ex-Aston Martin and Lola) was supervising the chassis construction and was later to take over Denny’s car working with Kiwi ex-Brabham mechanic Gary Taylor. Tyler Alexander was crew chief on Bruce’s car. Bill Eaton was sheet metal bender par excellence. Haig Alltounian came in from Shelby and Frank Zimmerman was taken on as a Gopher. "The best gopher we’ve ever had," comments McLaren.

Teddy Mayer as team manager was generally trying to be in three places at once with a worried frown and his yellow legal pad on which he painstakingly recorded all details of testing and development. Phil Kerr (Brabham’s ex-manager) looked after Formula 1 operations back in England.

In the drawing office, Jo Marquart was a new face. Of Swiss birth, he was immediately christened "The Foreigner" by a bunch of Americans and New Zealanders working in England. Marquart had left Switzerland to become assistant to the chief engineer of the Scottish Omnibus Company in Edinburgh, leaving there to go to Lotus and moving on to McLaren Racing when Robin Herd joined Cosworth. "Hanging the engine off the back of the monocoque was pretty much my idea." says McLaren. "Gordon Coppuck and I worked out the rear bulkhead, the suspension detail was a group effort, the front half of the chassis was largely Jo’s work and I worked out the body shape and general layout with Jim Clark of Specialised Mouldings.

Team Manager Mayer burst in on one design huddle over new hubs, blustering that he had to have cars to ship out in August and he couldn’t race just hubs and wheel bearings! The Foreigner won instant fame and affection on the factory floor when he replied. "Better we race hubs and wheel bearings than drawings only…"

McLaren reckons his Can-Am offensive – it was planned like a military campaign, let’s face it – cost around $180,000. "It cost us about $80,000 to run the engine division, and we’ll probably recover about $25,000 on the sale of engines we have left. The cars cost us something in the region of $50,000 each and these will remain on the books as assets worth probably $25,000. We won about $180,000 altogether, so if we were able to sell the cars and all the engines we would have a profit of about $100,000."

McLaren illustrates his escalation into the successful big time with a story from early in this year’s series when one of Shelby’s crew borrowed McLaren’s portable engine hoist. "I was reminded that it used to be us who did the borrowing and it used to be us who ran the little setup with one car. This time we had five chassis men, five engine men, three spare engines, two cars, three trucks, 4500 lb of spares and even a radio telephone!"